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If you’ve ever had a Red Eye — beer mixed with Clamato juice — on a bleary morning after, consider yourself ahead of the curve. Beer-based mixed drinks are a fast-growing trend.

Most of the beer cocktails popping up in bars and brew pubs around Vancouver are considerably more sophisticated than the post-bonspiel hangover cure that was traditional in my family and many thousands of others across Western Canada.

Vancouver’s beer cocktail evangelist Trevor Kallies has been experimenting with beer cocktails over the past five years, ever since being challenged to create a cocktail using Guinness by another uber-mixologist, Jay Jones of Market at the Shangri-La Hotel.

Kallies’s creation, consisting of Famous Grouse Whisky, maple syrup, chocolate bitters and Guinness, shaken over ice and served in an Old Fashioned glass with a rim of crushed walnuts, is pretty sophisticated stuff.

As the beverage director of Donnelly Group’s eight Vancouver pubs, few have done more than Kallies to spread the gospel of beer cocktails in this market. Kallies has created and promoted original beer cocktails for pub openings and for serious competitions.

He recently returned from France, a trip he won in the Annual Craft of Cointreau bartending competition last fall with a beer cocktail, the Orange Popsicle, which included Cointreau and Driftwood Brewing’s Fat Tug IPA.

All the Donnelly pubs carry beer cocktails as part of their regular menu, including two introduced last year for brunch menus called BBC1 and BBC2, for Breakfast Beer Cocktail. Nice that the beer-for-breakfast tradition is still alive and kicking.

“Customers really loved it, and both sold really well,” said Kallies.

Kallies is bullish on the beer cocktail for 2012.

“You’re going to see a lot more people do them on their full-time menus,” he said. “The beer cocktail has been around for a while but it is growing and growing really fast.”

Concoctions of dark beer and rum have been around for centuries and the Shandy — lager and sparkling lemonade or ginger ale — has been a pub staple in the U.K. for decades. Ditto for Black and Tan, a mix of stout and pale ale.

Purists might argue that a proper cocktail must include spirits, but the beer world doesn’t seem to care what purists think.

The crucible of the modern beer cocktail is — predictably — Portland, Ore., where craft beer culture always seems to be one step ahead.

Surrey’s Central City Brewing Co. has introduced a half-dozen beer cocktails to its regular bar menu, according to bar manager Eugene Mow.

“We looked at how popular [beer cocktails] are down the Oregon Coast and that’s why we started doing them,” said Mow. “We didn’t think we’d get a huge response, but it has really taken off.”

Central City puts its roster of beer cocktails on special Saturday nights, where they enjoy brisk sales.

Mow designed the brew pub’s cocktails, taking inspiration from the flavours inherent in the beer itself and choosing adjuncts to enhance those flavours.

“Our stout has a coffee-chocolatey flavour and we put Triple Sec with that for that classic chocolate-orange flavour,” said Mow.

Gastown’s toney Bitter Tasting Room has a roster of five beer cocktails on the menu, ranging from the traditional Shandy to the Bitter Chill, flavoured with tequila, ginger, lime salt and pepper, and a root beer float for grown-ups made with Hermannator Ice Bock, Root liqueur, Valdespino sherry and whipped cream.

Mission Springs Brewing Company is also trading on a classic chocolate and fruit combination with its Chocolate Raspberry, a blend of Fat Guy Stout and Lindeman’s Framboise.

Rogue Wetbar on the edge of Gastown introduced a trio of beer-based cocktails this month: the Gastown Panhandler, the Beerlini and the Michelada.

Donnelly Group beverage manager Trevor Kallies penned this nugget to introduce his staff to the beer cocktail concept:

One of the first written records of mixing beer into a “cocktail” was in the late 1600s and it took the form of a flip. In 1690 a popular saying ran around early America’s taverns:

‘The Days are short, the weather’s cold

By Tavern fires tales are told.

Some ask for dram when first come in.

Others with flip and bounce begin.’

After two decades the Flip’s popularity bordered on mania and would remain for more than a century.

To make this drink, a tavern keeper started with a larger pewter pitcher or vessel, then filled it with 2/3 strong beer or mead, and added some kind of sweetening agent — molasses, sugar, dried fruit or pumpkin (or whatever else was at hand). Then came a healthy dose of rum (5-10 oz.). This mixture was neither stirred nor shaken. They would take a loggerhead (a long steel rod with a ball on one end that resembles a trailer hitch) that was heated to be glowing red hot. The loggerhead would normally be used for heating tar or pitch, but this application was only slightly different. It would be directly taken from the coals and placed directly into the liquid mixture. The whole thing would boil and hiss and foam and then settle into a mighty head. The flip would result in a bitter, slightly burned taste.

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